Sunday, July 20, 2008

How good are the FBI's genetic test matches?

...'The Los Angeles Times reports that an Arizona crime lab technician found two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles, so similar that they would ordinarily be accepted in court as a match, but one felon was black and the other white. The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. Dozens of similar matches have been found, and these findings raise questions about the accuracy of the FBI's DNA statistics. Scientists and legal experts want to test the accuracy of official statistics using the nearly 6 million profiles in CODIS, the national system that includes most state and local databases. The FBI has tried to block distribution of the Arizona results and is blocking people from performing similar searches using CODIS. A legal fight is brewing over whether the nation's genetic databases ought to be opened to wider scrutiny. At stake is the credibility of the odds often cited in DNA cases, which can suggest an all but certain link between a suspect and a crime scene.'

The FBI's fondness for lie detectors and watch lists, not to mention abundant stories of incompetence over the past decade, gives them zero credibility. Not quite the negative credibility of the Bushies, but zero.

I believe they're guilty, and hiding their guilt. The testing is not as specific as they claim, perhaps because there crime labs are incompetent, perhaps because truly accurate tests cost more than they want to spend.